AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.4.2 - DirectX 12 Performance Boosted

Game Testing - Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider was always going to be on of the most interesting games to test with this new driver from AMD, as it is not only a game that used Nvidia GameWorks but doesn't make use of Asynchronous compute.

When we originally tested this game on the DirectX 12 API the game performed worse when using directX 12 in almost all cases, but will we see improvement now that AMD has released this new DirectX 12 driver?

1080p Performance

At 1080p we see a 4.4% performance gain from AMD's new driver on the average framerate, with similar gains on the minimum framerate.

In this game Nvidia's GTX 980Ti has a huge performance lead over the R9 Fury X at 1080p, but we can see that this gap decreases as we move to higher resolutions.

1440p Performance

At 1440p, we can see huge performance gains from AMD's R9 Fury X when using AMD's new 16.4.2 driver, with the games average framerate increasing by 11% and the games minimum framerate increase by a staggering 21%. It is clear now that DirectX 12 can offer more performance in

It is clear now that DirectX 12 can offer more performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider, especially when looking at minimum framerates.

Nvidia's GTX 980Ti does have higher average framerates at 1440p, but with these new drivers AMD has higher minimum framerates, giving AMD's R9 Fury X a steadier gaming experience.

4K performance

At 4K we can see that AMD's new 16.4.2 driver is able to give AMD higher minimum and average framerates, increasing the Average by 2FPS and the minimum by 4.

At 4K Rise of the Tomb Raider's becomes much smoother thanks to a higher minimum framerate, but unplayable unless the settings are lower a lot.

When gaming at 1080p Nvidia's GTX 980Ti easily beat AMD's R9 Fury X in Rose of the Tomb Raider, but at 4K things are very different, with both GPUs now performing on par with one another.

Is this the driver that increases DX12 performance? I didn't find that info in the driver release notes?

The main thing about this driver is the enhanced CF profiles for the Radeon Pro Duo, but it does offer more than what the release notes say.

AMD were nice enough to give us this driver early saying little more than that it contained new DirectX 12 optimizations, so we spent a lot of time testing it and low and behold we got a performance gain in every DirectX 12 game we tried.

While the performance gains are not massive, around 3-5% in most cases, they are very welcome. We expect that AMD are working on more optimizations for future releases, they want the best DX12 performance for when then next generation of products release.Quote

The main thing about this driver is the enhanced CF profiles for the Radeon Pro Duo, but it does offer more than what the release notes say.

AMD were nice enough to give us this driver early saying little more than that it contained new DirectX 12 optimizations, so we spent a lot of time testing it and low and behold we got a performance gain in every DirectX 12 game we tried.

While the performance gains are not massive, around 3-5% in most cases, they are very welcome. We expect that AMD are working on more optimizations for future releases, they want the best DX12 performance for when then next generation of products release.

Ah okay then. Small increases but as they get better with dx12 and games get better at using it, should work out for them in the long runQuote

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